Rep. Bobby Scott leads push to reduce mandatory federal sentences

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott co-sponsors bill that would give more sentencing discretion to judges on drug crimes

October 31, 2013|By Peter Dujardin, pdujardin@dailypress.com

NEWPORT NEWS — A federal lawmaker from the Peninsula is helping to lead a bipartisan effort to reduce minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes, which he and other backers say will translate into fewer prisoners and large cost savings.

U.S. Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott, D-Newport News, is the lead co-sponsor of the legislation, the "Smarter Sentencing Act." It was introduced in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, with a companion bill introduced in the Senate in July.

Under the bill, many of the nation's mandatory minimum sentences on drug crimes would be cut in half, thereby giving federal judges more leeway in determining how much prison time to give to those defendants.

"Mandatory minimums have been studied for a long time," Scott said in an interview Thursday. "And all these studies conclude that mandatory minimums fail to reduce crime, waste the taxpayers' money, and often require the judges to impose sentences that violate common sense."

The legislation would also increase the number of defendants eligible for a waiver that allows judges to sentence particular defendants below the minimums. That is, the bill would allow that "safety valve" to be available for people with more on their criminal records than is now the case.

Reducing the number of people jailed for drug crimes — and giving more sentencing discretion to judges — has become a bipartisan push in both houses of Congress.

That's a change from years past, Scott said, when federal lawmakers pushed strongly for mandatory minimum sentences. The champions of mandatory minimums seem to be quieter these days, he said.

"The question is no longer why don't you support mandatory minimums, but why do you?" Scott said. "We thought the fact that you don't see anyone defending mandatory minimums anymore, that maybe it's a good opportunity to repeal some of them."

Both houses

The House bill was sponsored and formally filed on Wednesday by U.S. Rep Raul Labrador, R-Ind., a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

Scott, the House's lead co-sponsor, is spearheading the effort to sell the bill to fellow Democrats. He serves on the House Judiciary Committee, and is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee's "over-criminalization task force."

The lawmakers are apparently following the people on the issue.

The United States, with five percent of the world's population, has a quarter of the world's prisoners — with four times as many mentally ill people in prisons than in hospitals. And with the state and federal budgetary crunches of recent years, an increasing number of people don't like the idea of continuing to support a burgeoning prison population.

According to a 2012 poll from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a majority of Americans think too many people are in prison and the nation spends too much to lock them up. "Voters overwhelmingly support a variety of policy changes that shift non-violent offenders from prison to more effective, less expensive alternatives," Pew Charitable Trusts said.

And non-violent drug offenders are the centerpiece of the effort to reduce costs.

According to Scott's office, the number of inmates in federal prison has grown five-fold in the past three decades, with half of them locked up for drug crimes. The cost of housing those inmates has expanded by 11 times over the 30 years, with each inmate now costing the federal government $29,000 a year, Scott's office said.

Other aspects

Aside from cutting the mandatory minimums, there are other aspects of the newly introduced bill.

The legislation also delves into the application of the Fair Sentencing Act, a 2010 law that reduced the huge sentencing disparity for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine.

Over the years, crack cocaine — seen as a mostly "black" drug — brought far more severe sentences than powder cocaine, seen as a mostly "white" drug. That's the case even though experts say the drugs and their effects are virtually identical.

With the Fair Sentencing Act, Congress took a large step toward reducing the disparity. Instead of punishing crack offenses 100 times more harshly than powder offenses, they're now punished "only" 18 times as harshly. But there's one big problem, Scott said: While the U.S. Sentencing Commission has retroactively applied many of the new changes, that retroactivity does not apply to the mandatory minimums.

"There are a lot of people languishing in prison who wouldn't be there for the Draconian length of time but for the fact that the judges had no discretion as to sentencing," Scott said.

The legislation introduced Wednesday would change that, allowing defendants sentenced on crack crimes to petition courts to be re-sentenced under the lower mandatory minimums passed in 2010.